Curve DAO (CRV)

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Historical price evolution of Curve DAO

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Curve DAO has its roots in the work of Michael Egorov, a Russian physicist with a doctorate obtained in Australia and co-founder of NuCypher, a company specialising in cryptographic infrastructure. In 2019, whilst reflecting on liquid staking, Egorov developed the StableSwap algorithm based on a key intuition: existing automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap generated excessive slippage when swapping assets of similar value, particularly stablecoins.

In January 2020, Curve Finance was launched on the Ethereum network. Despite initially having a total value locked (TVL) of merely $30,000-50,000, the protocol quickly became the dominant decentralised exchange for stablecoin trading, surpassing all its competitors. The launch of the CRV token on 13th August 2020 became one of the most unusual events in DeFi: an anonymous Twitter account (@0xc4ad) deployed the CRV contracts and the DAO before the team itself did so. After verifying that the contracts matched their specifications, the team accepted this deployment as the official launch. The @0xc4ad account subsequently disappeared from Twitter, creating what Egorov compared to the mystery of Satoshi's identity. The token was launched without presale, without ICO and without premine.

During DeFi Summer 2020, Curve's TVL experienced explosive growth and the concept of "Curve Wars" emerged, where multiple protocols began competing to accumulate locked CRV (veCRV) to direct CRV emissions towards their own liquidity pools. Convex Finance established itself as the main veCRV aggregator in this process. In 2021, the protocol expanded its scope beyond stablecoins with the launch of Curve v2, which introduced pools for volatile assets like ETH and BTC, including the first TriCrypto pool (USDT/WBTC/WETH). Growth continued until reaching a TVL of $24,000 million in January 2022.

In November 2022, Curve published the whitepaper for crvUSD, its own overcollateralised stablecoin that implemented a gradual liquidation mechanism called LLAMMA. The launch of crvUSD on Ethereum mainnet occurred in May 2023, with Egorov himself making the first transaction by depositing $1.8 million in sfrxETH as collateral and taking a $1 million loan in crvUSD.

The protocol faced significant challenges on 30th July 2023 when an exploit in old versions of the Vyper compiler affected several Curve pools, resulting in total losses of approximately $70 million, partially recovered by white hat hackers and MEV bots. The fall in CRV's price threatened to liquidate loans of approximately $100 million that Egorov had collateralised with CRV. To avoid these liquidations, he sold approximately $42 million in CRV to OTC investors, including Justin Sun, at a 25% discount. A year later, on 13th June 2024, a 24% fall in CRV's price triggered massive liquidations of Egorov's positions, who had $95.7 million in loans collateralised with $141 million in CRV distributed across 5 protocols. LlamaLend accumulated $10 million in bad debt, although Egorov managed to repay 93% within hours and 100% within days with help from a $6 million injection from an external investor.

For the third quarter of 2025, Curve recorded $29,000 million in quarterly trading volume, $7.3 million in revenue redistributed entirely to veCRV holders, and a TVL between $2,100 and $2,300 million. During this period, Egorov also launched Yield Basis, a new project designed to eliminate impermanent loss in volatile asset pools using crvUSD.

Curve Finance operates as a decentralised exchange (DEX) designed specifically for trading similar-value assets, such as stablecoins, liquid staking tokens and wrapped versions of Bitcoin. Its operation is based on the StableSwap algorithm, which concentrates liquidity around the expected price of these assets (typically a 1:1 ratio for stablecoins), minimising price slippage even in high-volume trades. Liquidity providers deposit their assets in specific pools and receive as compensation both the fees generated by trades and emissions of the native CRV token.

Curve's governance system is structured around the vote-escrowed CRV (veCRV) mechanism, where users can lock their CRV tokens in smart contracts for periods of up to four years. The amount of veCRV obtained is proportional to the lock-up time: longer duration equals more voting power. veCRV holders receive 50% of all trading fees from the protocol, can multiply their rewards as liquidity providers by up to 2.5 times, and participate in Curve DAO voting to determine which pools receive greater CRV emissions, a mechanism that forms the core of the so-called "Curve Wars".

The ecosystem is completed with crvUSD, the protocol's native stablecoin, which uses ETH, wBTC and liquid staking tokens as collateral. This stablecoin implements the LLAMMA (Lending-Liquidating AMM Algorithm) algorithm, which executes gradual liquidations of collateral in specific price bands instead of instantaneous mass liquidations, distributing liquidation risk across different price levels and reducing the volatility of the process.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.